A Climbing Robot for Cleaning Glass Surface with Motion Planning and Visual Sensing

Abstract

This chapter persents an application of a climbing robot for the glass cleaning service. The robot is constructed by two rodless cylinders and a rotation cylinder. The robot can adjust its orientation to maintain in the desired trajectory path. After finishing the cleaning work in one section of the glass wall, the robot can cross the window frame to enter another section. A visual sensing system, which is composed of an omnidirectional CCD camera and two laser diodes, is applied to measure the robot’s position and orientation on the glass wall. Experiments demonstrate that with the assistance of the proposed motion planning and visual sensing technologies, the climbing robot can perform cleaning work on the glass wall effectively. Future work will be toward developing more efficient motion control system and reducing size/weight of the climbing robot.